Most recent stories

Process and Procedure

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“I changed religions for that baby.”

Losing Things

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I infuriate myself with this gift.

Dream Life (flash friday)

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Virginia hated herself for every moment she spent wondering what it would have been like if things had been different. How would her life be if Glen hadn’t been misdiagnosed, if he hadn’t died when she was a year married and four months pregnant? Not

Glance

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I saw a former lover today, by complete accident.

The Flight

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Of course, you're eventually struck by the thought that the house you saw on the hill was not your house and that those children and the dog are purely matter for the strange.

Bonfire

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On our back porch, the tiki torches are lit and so am I.

Reindeer Nights

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It all started a long time ago. September 1, 1939, Hitler invaded Poland. His army was moving fast. We lived not far from the city of Krakow. On the third day of invasion a lot of men (civilian) walked through our city, running away from the German Army.

Orange Tears

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Remember me? I am the large, dented acorn you threw at your brother, Ken, during the huge acorn war of 1969. You were thirteen. He was eleven. And the entire neighborhood was in your backyard that day. Steve, Jack, Jerry, Tom, Dan, Jeff, Drew. A bunch of the kids…

Luther Loves Lucy

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Luther Mishmash stood numbly in the yard, dumbly staring at the soiled pair of underpants flapping lazily in the breeze on the wash line. Grandpa had wet himself again. Tomorrow, at school, he knew he’d hear about it. Luther wasn’t sure which was more

My Son Thinks He's French

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My son thinks he's French.His accent was cute at first, but it's starting to get on my nerves. If he asks for another glass of Beaujolais I'm gonna go to jail for child abuse.Yesterday, I walked upstairs to make him turn his new Jacques Brel album down and I swear it…

The serious writer and her bush

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The serious writer looks back on a long and distinguished career as an herbologist.

Lancelot Meets Goya Meets Cortázar Meets Mowat

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to say that he was doing fine

Like An Endless Rain

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Fate could have sent me any number of Sergeant-Detectives, but fate sent me one of Boston’s finest, Sergeant-Detective Sheila Magnuson. Aside from being a little undernourished Sheila Magnuson is possibly the world’s most beautiful Sergeant-Detective.

City Crossing

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Maybe we all met, somewhere, in between streets.

Condensation on the Glass

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Condensation on the Glass Riding down 22, I'm looking out the window. Time is a whirlwind. Your memory relinquishes itself, yellowed and fraying at the edges. It's raining and cold. I make a smiley face in the condensation …

A Body Divided, 1

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A Body Divided: Memoir 1 When I came back home, after coming down with polio, everything had changed for me. I'd been gone for forty-five long days and nights. But it was Halloween, a time very nearly sacred for children in the Midwest, and it broug

Closed Curve

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What the heck to believe in??

What happens when you listen too much

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It's definitely not her pretty face that made him smile so quirkily when she returned in the evening.

A Jeep Wrangler, a moped, a bank bag, Woody Guthrie and stained teeth

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A bank bag now hung from those teeth—yellow-gray rancid, decaying teeth, strands of tobacco chew laced in between. Those thin pen mark lips could not hide the teeth’s keyhole spaces, shaped by open cavities—the bank bag hung from those teeth. The me

Not Even Know It

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I remember the man well, though he didn't notice me.Even though a million tiny things happened to cause his hand to brush me away from his neck, he didn't notice. Much like the way his eyes bounced off women's bodies as he hurried down the sidewalk in his blue wool…

Basement Concert

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You don't just hear the sound, you are the sound, you and everyone else in the room.

What He Didn't Tell the New Kitty

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“What the hell kind of name is Angel? Who were you with before, some little girl?”

Whatever Happened to Sue Ellen?

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When she awoke in her yard, she poured what was left of the rum into the dead grass. The man beside her lay with fingers curled, a claw she’d found wedged up her skirt when she woke. Tom, she said, his name nonsense, tongues. Might as well have been any

Flamingos

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Over fifty plastic flamingos stood silently at attention... as if eating sea urchins out of our lawn.

Gardening

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Something about the Garden of Eden. That it isn't really a garden, and I'm not even sure what Eden means.

Four Fundamentalist Teenagers In Front Of A Metropolitan Railway Car

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That morning, four children appeared in front of the train, which was ready to depart

Moses Reborn

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Influenza Jones knew she was Moses. Reborn, of course, because the real Moses had been dead for longer than Influenza could remember. It didn’t matter that she was a woman and Moses was a man, she knew what her body say and her body say she be Moses. Sh

Hearts in Exurbia

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Silent Murf was largely toothless, and the gaze from his eyes diverged in opposing directions; his skinny arms were a fancywork of jailhouse tattoos and what appeared to be scabbed-over claw marks.

Invasion

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That summer crawled with them, insects of every denomination: cicadas caught by the cat, wingless, came to rest in the roots of the garden we planted; sudden swarms of dragonflies...

Pretty White Gloves

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He sits on a folded-over cardboard box, slightly off-balance and without any visible sign of support other than the granite wall of the bank behind him and the few coins in the paper cup he shakes at each passerby.